Monica Seles’ years of grief

Monica Seles had her destiny snatched away when she was just 19, says Tim Adams in the London Observer. The young tennis star had already won eight grand-slam victories and was being touted as the greatest female player of all time. Then, at a tournament in Germany on April 30, 1993, a deranged fan of her rival, Steffi Graf, ran onto the court and stabbed her in the back with a 9-inch knife. While Seles was in the hospital, there came another trauma: Her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. “That day in Hamburg, everything was taken away from me,” she says. “My innocence. My rankings, my endorsements. And the one person who could have comforted me, my father, was facing this awful illness.” Seles sought refuge in food, which hurt her performance when she returned to the professional circuit; by 1997, she was 35 pounds overweight. “If a player hit a drop shot or something I’d be thinking, If I was skinnier I’d have got that ball.” She tried every kind of crash diet, in vain. Then, following a series of foot and ankle problems that ended her career, Seles started taking long walks, during which she realized she was eating to blunt her pain. Once she faced her grief, the hunger went away. “I had it the wrong way round. It was not about what I was eating but about what was eating me.”

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